Animal Phase
by Asidian
Summary: Akane is eleven, and her love of animals is just getting started. Aoi foresees a difficult Christmas wish, this year. Warnings for spoilers.


Author's notes: After writing two very dark fics for this game, I felt pretty terrible and decided to do something light, instead.

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><p>Animal Phase<p>

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><p>The year Akane turned eleven, she began her animal phase, and halfway through the year, Aoi knew he had a problem on his hands. "Wouldn't it be fun to have an elephant for a pet?" she asked him on a pleasant, sunny afternoon in the middle of June, and never before had such innocent words struck such terror into the heart of a fourteen-year-old boy.<p>

"Yeah," he'd replied, "but can you picture an elephant in our apartment? It'd take up the whole place. We'd have to crawl under it just to get in the door."

And so he initiated his covert campaign against elephants. They couldn't afford a television, but he dug up articles: how much they ate, how much mess they made, how much time the zoo workers had to put into taking care of them. They went to the zoo, an expense he justified by patching up his pants again instead of buying a new pair, and Akane got to hear all about it in person.

In August, the elephant was forgotten and it became, "Don't crocodiles have the coolest tails?"

Again the gripping terror, and again the casual response: "Yeah, but can you imagine trying to brush those teeth?"

Out came the crocodile articles: the danger, the damp environment, the death roll. And when September came around, Aoi was ready to go on the offensive.

First he enthused about fish- the way they breathed, the way they swam, the different fins. When Akane showed no interest, he switched to lizards, and then to birds. Hamsters, snakes, ferrets, and mice all failed to capture her imagination; snails and frogs couldn't do it, either.

In late November, to his utter horror, she began talking about giraffes- and so it came to be that on the day his sister wrote her yearly letter to Santa, Aoi was certain that this year, finally, her request would be something he could not fulfill.

When it was returned to sender a week later, he took it from the mail box with a sickened sort of dread. "Not a giraffe," he whispered, as though to bargain with a letter already written. "Not a crocodile. Not an elephant."

In any other year, the words upon the page would have been a disaster. Where would they get the money for food, not to mention the other necessities? But this year, after a whole zoo had seemed possible, his sister's actual wish felt like a reprieve.

"Dear Santa," she had written. "This year, I would really, really like for you to bring me a kitten. I promise to take very good care of him. Thank you! Love, Akane."

Aoi did not balk, but only tallied up the numbers: the price of cat food, the price of litter boxes, the price of litter. He worked it out on paper to be sure- checked it twice, just in case. Their monthly bills and his monthly income didn't leave much room for maneuverability, but if he started skipping lunch, another ongoing expense wouldn't be out of the question. Akane would never need to know: he made both of their lunches anyway, so he could hide it easily enough as long as he kept bringing the empty lunch box to work with him.

And so began Operation: Perfect Kitten.

The pet stores came first, with rows of glass displays that held rows of tiny eyes peering out of tiny, fuzzy faces. Aoi watched the kittens watching him, and he wondered what color Akane would like best. White, maybe? Orange?

He worried about it right up until he chanced to glimpse the price tag on one of the little creatures, and then he had new worries- because the number listed was fully ten times the amount that he'd set aside for Christmas.

Next came the shelters, and with them the challenge of finding time to travel the city to visit them when his sister wouldn't suspect what he was up to. The first was strictly for dogs; another housed only grown cats. The third had what he was looking for- a calico and a black kitten- but they fought while he was there, tearing at each other with sharp little claws that Aoi couldn't help but picture tearing at his sister's hands.

It was the middle of December when he found the forth shelter, just as Aoi was beginning to think that perhaps this year he would fail, after all. He knew when he saw it that he'd found the kitten for his sister: a small, grey ball of fluff that pressed against his fingers to be petted, purred with a voice surprisingly deep for something its size. The lady at the shelter told him that he'd have to pay for shots and to get the little thing spayed, and though the total would take every yen of his Christmas money- along with the little bit he'd scraped together for a scarf to supplement his threadbare jacket- he could have kissed her in gratitude.

The only hurdle left was to make sure the kitten stayed a secret until Christmas morning. Even under normal circumstances, Aoi didn't suppose it would be easy to keep an animal hidden, but the one-room apartment they shared would make it impossible to keep the kitten from Akane's eyes if he brought it home. The shelter was open on the 24th, though- and a charming smile and some newly-made cookies for their neighbor to the left ensured that the tiny creature would have a place to stay the night.

And so it came to be that on early Christmas morning, Aoi tied a ribbon around the neck of a kitten in a box beneath their tiny, plastic Christmas tree and snuck back off to bed, waiting for his sister to discover it. When Akane's shriek of joy split the air, shattering the early morning stillness, the boy grinned into his pillow. "Aoi! Look at this! Look what Santa left!"

And suddenly, all at once, the past six months became worth every second.

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><p>Author's notes: My original idea was to have Akane ask for something really ridiculous and have Aoi go crazy trying to find it, inspired by the song, "I want a Hippopotamus for Christmas." She was going to ask for an elephant, and he was going to come up with a very creative way to fulfill the wish, but I couldn't think of anything clever. I was like "Maybe a stuffed animal!" but that is kind of lame and wouldn't count. Then I was like "Maybe he can write her a letter back from Santa, explaining that he is keeping the elephant for her at the north pole, since she doesn't have space for it, and send her picture updates every few weeks of "her" elephant- and really he is just sneaking out to the zoo or something and photo stalking this elephant." But then I thought that he would probably count that as a failure, since he didn't actually get her anything. Then I was like "Maybe he can sign her up for one of those animal-adoption programs, where you sponsor a wild animal," but that seemed like a pain to set up and explain in a fic. So I ended up going this route, instead. Hope it came out okay.<p>

As a side note, when I finished writing this, I thought, "And then he comes home from the Nonary game next year, after his sister's been burned to death, and finds the kitten dead because no one was there to give it water." Somehow, even my happy fics are depressing. ._.a

Unrelatedly, writing this also made me realize that if they're only three years apart and Aoi's been saving up for presents for her for _years_ when she's twelve, how the hell old was he when he started working? And how did they fall through the cracks so completely? THAT is a fic I'd like to read. :|a


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